College Best Publication Award for 'Improved Determination of G Using Two Methods'. Professor Clive Speake and coauthors recently published results of a determination of the value of Newton's constant of gravitation, G (Physics Review Letters 111,101102, 2013).

Members of the HiROS research group took part in the "Meet the Scientist" outreach event at the Birmingham Thinktank Museum. The group presented a variety of activities related to sound and resonance, results on "sounding stars" with asteroseismology, and a "create your own exoplanet lightcurve" activity, all of which proved popular with children and their parents.

The discovery of the Higgs boson was one of the landmark discoveries of 2012 and it will be remembered forever in the history of science. The news was shared around the World within minutes of the CERN announcement. Dr Mirco Musolesi's paper 'The Anatomy of Scientific Rumor' published in Nature Scientific Reports and awarded Best Paper October 2013, presents a study of the spread of communication on Twitter around the time of the announcement and explores the increasingly important role social media takes in the communication of science and in the scholarly debate.

While understanding the rules of the abstract part of physics called'quantum mechanics' occupied the 20th century, harnessing its power for applications will be a dominant theme of the 21st century. Making the earth beneath our feet transparent is the latest example of utilising the strange properties of the microscopic quantum world to provide such a 'Quantum Technology'.